


Wayland Wood

by Orockthro



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Architect!Peter, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-17 10:29:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14830569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: Peter knew his calling from an early age. It wasn't to be a fireman or a police officer... it was to be an architect. So he studied hard, finally figured out how to draw properly, and went to school. Being an office gopher in a big firm wasn't what he had in mind, but it's a stepping stone. He'll get there. Now if only he can figure out the weird permitting issue with the project their client, Lady Ty, wants to build over at Russell Square...(Or, an AU where Peter isn't a cop, but paths still cross.)





	Wayland Wood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jadesfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jadesfire/gifts).



> Thank you for the wonderful prompts, Jadesfire! I took a few of the things you said you'd like, and went. I hope you enjoy!

I knew my calling from an early age. It wasn’t to be a fireman or copper or even a jazzman like my dad. No. I, Peter Grant, was going to be an architect. I was going to work hard, get decent grades, finally figure out how to draw, and go on to become one of the great names in modern London architecture. I was going to slowly help the city recover from it’s seriously unfortunate obsession with brutalist concrete monstrosities, and usher in a new era of classic, functional, beautiful--

“Grant!”

Turns out even when you make it through school with not-so-bad marks, and even when you get hired on by a well respected London architecture firm, no one really wants you doing much actual architecting. Not when you’re six months into the job and still trying not to take a stapler to your own hand to relieve the boredom of daily progress meetings, at least.

“Have pulled the historicals for the Tyburn job yet?”

Most of my days at Lansing & Powell are spent running errands between various libraries to make copies of historical blueprints and land plots, and writing reports on said historical blueprints and land plot maps for the higher ups to present to clients about why they can’t actually do what they want to do. This week I learned that Mrs. Freedsberg doesn’t actually own the plot she wants to expand her garden into, and Mr. Holls, despite his bluster, lied about the antiquity of his property and scrubbed out the date on the drawings he presented in the design meeting.

But most interestingly, my day today was filled with pulling the historicals for the Tyburn job. Or it would have, if anything existed. The dozen or so libraries I frequent, the web, even the list of historic buildings of London had nothing but crickets on the property she was requesting a teardown of. In context, the little shack the worst walk-up slum building has about a hundred pages of documentation about it. Just about everything in London is steeped with history, people protesting any changes made to anything older than their mothers, and surprise archaeological finds under the pavement. The city has existed in one form or another for nearly 2,000 years, and nothing with posts or block or brick is without enough paperwork behind it to make a grown man weep. And this property was a (generous) stone’s throw from the British Museum-- the whole area was filled with historically relevant properties.

But, apparently, not this one. Not the row of Georgian terraces that Ms. Cecelia Tyburn Thames wants torn down to its foundations.

“Sir, I couldn’t find anything--” I start, ready to list off the various institutions I’d tried to research at. Because it was absurd that I couldn’t find anything, and surely that would be questioned. But my boss, Damien Mally, one of the Senior Partners at the architecture firm just nodded. We’re piled into the impeccably decorated and shockingly non-functional conference room used to show off the firm’s prowess to unsuspecting clients, and Mally is perched on the edge of a bright red plastic chair in the middle of the room, like some sort of benevolent dictator.

“Good, thank you, Peter.”

And that was it. The rest of the meeting droned on, but I kept spinning back to the row of terraces on Russell Square. By my guess, they were built sometime in the 1810s. They’d survived the Blitz, but they weren’t going to survive Lady Ty, the business woman whose face flashed newspapers right and left-- the woman who was going to remake London.

I go back to my small little cubicle after the meeting ends, and spend the rest of the late morning staring at the plans for the Russell Square rebuild. It's hideous. Concrete and blocky and looming-- the ground floor will be boutique shops, and the top five floors above it a hotel. It is, I am told, the client’s right to direct the aesthetic look of the design, and not ours to question it. They're already finalizing the contract with the builder, my little fact finding mission was just to have a paper trail of effort should something come up during the demolition. According to the computer files I’d taken a peek at, Lady Ty bought out all the property’s owners within the last month, and somehow secured permits the very same day.

The tiny black letters on my fancy state-of-the-art computer screen look at me again.

Permits. The same day. Somehow Lady Ty cut through three meters of bureaucratic red tape with a breath. Nothing suspicious about that.

“Lor, I’m going to run out for lunch,” I lie. Sometime during the meeting I'd made up my mind of what I was going to do, but there was no way I was risking my job by saying it out loud.

“Whatever,” she says, with two paper clips held between her teeth.

Lor has only worked for Lancing & Powell for six months longer than I have. You'd think that would make us defacto friends, but alas, her black haired head hardly every turns my direction. Not even when I'm speaking to her. I keep trying, though.

“Want to grab a drink? After work, I mean?”

“Nope.” She pulls the paperclips out of her mouth and pops the final ‘p’ sound. She doesn't look at me as I pack up my briefcase and head down the stairs to the street.

It was a long shot, anyway. The people here at Lancing & Powell Architects are the posh sort, not the ‘get drinks with the minions after work’ sort. And definitely not the ‘date Peter Grant’ sort. I can live with that.

But it does feel, just sometimes, like there's something missing.

Like I could have had some other life.

\---

London is big, not just old, and getting around it takes years of practice. Luckily I’m a Londoner through and through. It also helps that the office of the hip and trendy Lancing & Powell Architects is near Hyde Park, so it’s just a matter of hopping on the Piccadilly line and off again at Russell Square.

I have a car-- a beat up little Astro, with two doors a different color from the rest-- but only Damien Mally gets a parking spot at the office, so my little Astro stays at my mum’s place at the Peckwater Estate, waiting for me to become a famous architect with a parking spot all my own. Until then, the Piccadilly line, an Oyster card, and the same mass transit as the majority of Londoners do me alright.

The Georgian terraces of Lady Ty's future monstrosity of a building were about as I expected them-- lovely examples of their period in architectural history, a series of joined mansions end-to-end, wonderfully kept up, and full of the sort of British austerity and stateliness one expects of them. They’re facing the square, too. The location is amazing, and it’s no surprise that Tyburn is keen to monetize it. What’s a surprise is that monetizing it is even an option. They’re red brick and in solid condition, not crumbling or a safety hazard, and yet all but one of them has a little sign in a ground floor window warning of their impending demise by our own hands.

The single address without a little yellow ‘future building site’ sign taped up on the door is the one whose steps I climb. As soon as I reach the top stair I notice something else that sets the property apart from the rest: carved into the stone lintel are the words “scientia potestas est.” I file the words away to look up later, and in the meantime go to knock on the brass knocker that adorns the outside of the double door. As soon as I put a foot towards the door I feel a wave of something come over me.

I smell leather and honey and the thinnest whiff of a cigar long-ago smoked. Only I breathe in deep and suck in the damp London air, and none of those smells are real. But the feeling of those smells hit like a freight train, and I take a step back.

As soon as I do, the door opens. It creeks like something out of a horror film, and it’s only at the sound that I realize I hadn’t actually knocked.

Standing in the doorway, almost completely in the shadow of the entrance way, is a tall woman with long dark hair in a proper, old school maid’s outfit. Now, my mum is a house cleaner, and her uniform is the more modern variety-- a smock apron with big pockets for rags over a pair of cotton pants: easy to wash and keep clean. This woman looked like she’d stepped out of the Edwardian era, starch and all. Complete with blankly staring face and dark, eerie eyes. There’s something odd about her but I can’t put a finger on it.

“Hello, my name is Peter Grant, I’m from Lancing & Powell Architects... the firm hired to design...” It’s hard to know what to call the ugly thing they’re designing for this space. I end up saying what Mally’s been calling it in the awful meetings, “Lady Tyburn’s multi-purpose creative and entrepreneurial space that’s going to...”

She shuts the door in my face. But not before I see something like utter hatred flash across her face.

“Excuse me? Ma’am? I’m just trying to make sure that it’s even legal? Do you have any information about that?” She doesn’t have to know that my job is to visit libraries and make photocopies of things for the lawyers, and absolutely not to investigate things on my own.

The door opens, just a sliver, and a little pad of paper comes out, clutched in sharp, talon-like hands. I wonder where she gets her nails done, and push past the weird smell-sensation-emotion wall that seems to hit me when I got too close to pluck it from her grip.

It's handwritten, the ink still drying as if she’d written it with a quill or a fountain pen-- it would match her outfit, I think in the little hind part of my brain that thinks all sorts of thoughts unbidden-- and just says, “This Property Owned. Not Sold. NOT SOLD.” The final line is under-scored twice.

The door opens again and this time one of the yellow ‘future building site’ signs comes flying out, a huge “X” marked over it with red paint. At least I hope it's paint.

“Are you the owner? Can I speak to them?”

This time the door remains shut.

“Can I have a name at least?”

Under the bottom of the door a single business card slips out, for a D.C.I. Thomas Nightingale, with the Metropolitan police.

Well.

I hadn’t been expecting that.

\---

Lor is still ignoring me when I get back to the office, and I take that as permission to sneak off to Mally’s office. He always takes off around 2 o’clock to ‘do the rounds’ which means his office is vacant for a long period in the afternoon. And this is a phone call I don’t want to make in the open air of my cubicle, but one I do want coming from a landline phone at the office, to add credulity.

“Just five minutes,” I mouth to his secretary, Alice, as I shut myself in. She is almost as stone-faced as the woman at Russell Square. Almost. But Alice has been reasonably nice to me in the past. At least she looks at me when I talk to her.

Once the door is shut and I’m alone in Mally’s ridiculously over-designed office-- no one needs hard plastic ornamental chairs, especially not someone actually expecting people to sit in them-- I pick up his phone. I stand, avoiding his own chair as well as the ones destined to break under me, and dial the number on the card.

“Metropolitan police,” a voice answers. It’s gruff, but feminine. Not D.C.I. Thomas Nightingale, then.

“Hi, I’m looking for D.C.I. Thomas Nightingale? This is Peter Grant, I’m working with--” I’m cut off before I can get into his lengthy and half-improvised rendition of why I'm calling a Detective Inspector about a building works project, and it’s probably for the best.

“I’m sorry, D.C.I. Nightingale is unavailable at the moment. Can I take a message? Get it to another inspector?”

“No, it’s actually him I need to speak to,” I say, flipping his card over in my hands, and keeping an eye on the clock-- also over-designed and covered in -- at the same time. It’s approaching two thirty, and the risk of Mally walking in on me is increasing.

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

There’s a pause on the other end that I clock as wrong. Then another person picks up. The voice is masculine this time, but it’s immediately clear this is not D.C.I. Nightingale either.

“Who is this?”

“Um. Peter Grant. I’m with Lancing & Powell Architects?”

“And you’re looking for Nightingale?”

“Yes?”

“Is it one of the weird cases then? Something unexplainable? Wacky? You thought someone was on LSD but now you’re not sure? A ghost maybe? Someone possessed?”

“No?”

“Architect, eh? Walls moving, maybe?”

This conversation was not turning out as I expected it would. At all.

There’s a quiet knock at the door. Alice was sticking her neck out for me. I’ll be damned. “I’m calling about his involvement with a Russell Square property, actually. Do you know if he was investigating a permitting issue? Or unlawful seizure of property?”

There’s a guffaw on the other end. “Nightingale? Permitting issue? Unlikely. Russell Square, though, that’s his haunt, so to speak. Heh..." The speaker clears his throat. "He lives there. Or, well..."

He trails off and I'm left waiting awkwardly. Eventually I speak up. "Oh?"

“I’m afraid DCI Thomas Nightingale is missing.”

\---

Lor doesn’t say anything when I duck out early from work, and I doubt anyone else really notices. I’m often going here and there on my grunt-work runs, anyhow.

I don’t go home, though. I go back to Russell Square.

In some other life I’m probably not a bored low-level assistant architect with delusions of grandeur. But I never found much use in thinking about that too much. I’m a here and now sort of guy, and here and now there’s something fishy going on with Lady Ty’s acquisition of the Russell Square properties, and our subsequent design plan for the land. And I never could leave well enough alone. Just ask my most recent ex-girlfriend.

I trudge across town once more, up the stone stairs to the row house belonging to DCI Nightingale, and knock. At the top step I get the same odd sensation of old leather and books and tobacco smoke, and the door creaks open.

“Hello? This is Peter Grant again? We spoke earlier?”

There’s no answer, but the door doesn’t slam in my face, so I call it a win. I hesitate for a brief second-- because what am I doing here, really-- but step over the threshold.

The interior of the building is a perfectly-preserved Georgian terrace house, exactly as advertised on the outside. It’s got shining, polished woodwork, clean tiles on the floor, and a statue in the middle of the entryway. And, of course, one Edwardian maid, in the shadow of said statue. I manage to not quite jump out of my skin, but it’s a near thing.

“Hi, I called the number on the card you gave me. The owner of the house is the missing police officer?”

She hisses, and I’m not too embarrassed to admit that I flinched.

“Look, I’m actually trying to help, okay? This building is beautiful and I don’t want it to be knocked down, especially not for an ugly business center. If it’s an illegal move, I might be able to get our permit pulled. I just need proof of ownership.”

It’s a bit of a stretch of the truth, but not far off. About seven hundred layers of red tape sifted through, and I’d cross my heart on it.

The Edwardian maid shifts a bit and looks to the side.

“No papers?”

Silence.

“And the owner is... gone.”

Somehow this silence felt pointed.

“I see. Well--”

Somehow between one blink and the next, she was an inch from my face, breathing down the collar of my shirt. Her eyes are black and the pupils seem wrong somehow, but I can’t put a finger on it. Wherever the leather and honey smell came from, it isn’t her. She smells like starch and something coppery. Blood. I shiver.

I’m so wrapped up in imagining my own murder, that I almost don’t notice when she palms a piece of paper into my hand.

It’s a twitter handle. And a map.

\---

I head back to my mum’s house to collect my car. I’m tempted to just pick up the little multi-colored Astro from the lot outside of the council tower and not stop in, but my mum would find out--she always does-- and I’d never survive the night. So I pop up for tea, which in my mum’s house means helping her with the ironing and having a massive bowl of the spiciest food you’ve ever eaten. One time I brought a girl around from architecture school, and we’d had to leave so she could vomit in the bushes down on the ground level--her idea of spicy and my mum's differed. She hadn’t wanted to go out with me again after that, funnily enough.

I manage to escape with a kiss on the cheek and a few sips of milky tea, and race down the stairs to the lot to pick up my car. It grumbles when I turn the key-- I try to give it a drive every few days to keep it happy, but I hadn’t been back to the Peckwater Estate in almost a week-- but eventually shivers to life.

As soon as it’s idling in the lot I check my phone. There’s a new DM from the twitter handle scrawled on the map.

@MollyCooks1912: N last checked in at “x” on map

@MollyCooks1912: Are u there yet?

@MollyCooks1912: ?????????

I hate twitter.

@LordGrant2: Just got my car. Heading out soon. Police have no leads?? What does N look like?

@MollyCooks1912: [image loading...]

She doesn’t answer my question about the cops-- it is very possible they haven’t talked to her at all, I suppose. This Nightingale is a cop, and the chance of me randomly stumbling upon him on the side of the road when the London Metropolitan Police couldn’t track him down seems unlikely. But I really have nothing better to do-- no girlfriend, not a lot of friends period, in fact. And it’s either head home to my crappy studio apartment near work and reminisce on how boring and uninspired my life is, or back up to my mum’s.

So I put the Astro in gear and head out of the lot.

The map has me trekking all the way up to Wayland Wood, in Norfolk. It’s a solid 2 hour drive up the A11 and then the M11, and I fret about the Astro nearly the whole way there.

But somehow we get up there just fine. I pull over to the side of the road where the ‘wood’ in the placename references begins--outside Watton-- and check my phone. The image has loaded and I squint down at it. A slender man in a nice suit stares at something off screen. The photo was clearly taken in a moment of unawares, and only half his face is visible. Brown hair, brown eyes, and a sharp nose. It isn't a mug shot, but it will have to do.

@MollyCooks1912: ?????

@MollyCooks1912: R U THERE???

@LordGrant2: I don’t text and drive, and I don’t tweet and drive either

@MollyCooks1912: N investigating reported possible vampire nest at cottage on edge of wood

I looked down at my phone again, and then out the windshield. It's raining out, the typical English drizzle that makes everything damp and cold and bleak. Even with the backdrop of the foggy woodland in front of me, the urge to shiver has nothing to do with the weather.

@LordGrant2: Vampire nest? Is that code for something?

@MollyCooks1912: No. Don’t go in. Just look outside. For clues.

I have questions. I have a _lot_ of questions. My fingers hover over the touchpad on my phone and I think about which ones will benefit me most from typing out. Why didn’t @MollyCooks1912 come to look for Nightingale herself? Why didn’t she speak to the police officers who were her boss’s colleagues? Was I being punked? Was I very much going to lose my job when Damien Mally figured out I was investigating the legality of the firm’s biggest client? Did I care about that last one?

In the end I type: “OK,” and hit send. I put the car in park. Apparently I'm doing this.

Have I mentioned I hate leaving things unresolved? It’s cost me at least one romantic relationship, but I can’t help it. I open the door of the Astro and step out into the mist.

The cottage listed as the ‘vampire nest’-- whatever that is code for-- on the map is on the top of a gently sloping hill a few hundred meters into the woods. I follow the dotted line on the map, using the compass app on my phone to orient myself. My feet squelch over the wet oak leaves carpeting the ground, and the whole woods gets darker and darker as I leave the road behind.

The cottage is a one-story little building with a wattle and daub fence keeping it apart from the looming, dark trees around it. I spot it easily once I am in the right part of the park.  A single, massive oak tree spreads out above it like something out of a fairytale picture book, and a little worn goat path lead up to the house. I stumbled up it in the muck the rain is producing.

The cottage looks dark. Abandoned. And creepy. A half dozen robins line the crest of the roof and stare down at me. It almost feels like they're watching.

“Hello?” I mean to shout, but it comes out a perfectly average volume, and a little shaky. I'm still a few feet away from the front door, and happy to stay that way. I try to pretend that it is a clear, sunny day. The cottage wouldn’t look ominous then, surely. It's just the weather, and my vivid imagination.

My phone buzzes and I pull it out of my pocket, shielding it from the rain.

@MollyCooks1912: DON’T GO IN.

I shiver.

@LordGrant2: Why didn’t you tell the police? About this place?

My phone is quiet for awhile, and I started to feel silly, standing in the yard of an abandoned hut on the top of a hill in the English countryside. When I look down to check it again, it's dead. Which is odd. The battery had been fine.

It's at this point I ought to have looked around myself and wondered what I, Peter Grant, Junior Architect at Lansing & Powell, was doing out in the darkening woods, with a dead mobile, in the rain, two hours from home. And I hadn’t told anyone where I was, not even my mother.

And while those thoughts dance on the edge of my consciousness, I don't pay them much mind even though I really ought to. Instead, I start around the cottage, looking for ‘clues’ with no real idea what I’m doing. I went to architecture school, and trained in hand drawing, not policing.

But it did teach me to pay attention to details.

The cottage is wrong.

The wattle and daub look real enough, and the little bramble fence is certainly real when I brush up against it. But the style, the construction of it, doesn't make any sense. A cottage this old-- and it certainly looked like it's been here for a hundred years, slowly melting into the forest-- out to have its roof moldering and caved in. Thatch roofs don’t last without maintenance; the straw decomposes rapidly without love put back into them. But this roof isn't constructed of the traditional straw thatch. It's made of oak leaves, woven together like the forest floor, thicker branches weaving together to give it a rigid structure. In fact, it almost looks like the roof is a part of the tree that's growing directly behind the hut.

As I step closer to get a better look at it, I'm hit with another sense of something inexplicable.

The faint smell of leather, honey, a three-day-ago smoked cigar, and old books.

I reel back a step. _That_ is uncomfortably familiar. I shiver again and hug my arms across my chest, wishing for a coat even though it's summer.

Then the cottage’s oak roof shifts. The leaves don't flutter like do in the wind. They shift like they're _alive_ , like they're _crawling towards me_.

I run down the path to my car like a champion footballer. I would have gotten inside and driven right back down to Londontown, except my keys aren't in my pocket.

They're up at the top of the hill, where I dropped them.

It's at this point, finally, that I start to wonder what I, Peter Grant, Junior Architect at Lansing & Powell, am doing here. But by this point, I'm committed. I need my keys, and surely it's all just my imagination going haywire. I'm getting pranked, that’s all. So I go back up the hill and start poking around in the damp, leaf covered ground looking for my keys, and very carefully not looking up at the cottage.

Vampire nests, missing persons, illegal building projects, conspiracies... I'm so wrapped up in trying to figure out just how many people are involved in making me feel a fool, I almost don't notice when the stick I'd grabbed from the underbrush to poke at the wet leaves goes right through what a second before looked like solid ground.

I lose my footing and stumble forward, very nearly pitching into hole that shimmers into view in front of me. Not three seconds before it had been invisible.

There's something in the hole, too. Something dark, moving in the shadows.

“Ahhh!”

In the moment, I was sure that the shout was some sort of horrible animal cry coming from the thing in the hole. Later I embarrassingly realized the shouting was my own.

I stare down into the hole-- grave? _Vampire nests_ a little voice in the back of my head whispers. But I tamp it down. I am a man who appreciates reason, logic, and science. I have no evidence to support anything except a hole under some leaves, and a weird animal sound.

And for all I know my keys are down there, too, in the magically appearing hole.

Just as I'm girding my loins to look again, something snakes around my ankle and takes a firm hold, and then I'm yanked down to the ground in a swift and jerking motion. I fall with a whomph as the air leaves my lungs and my face hits the muddy earth, and while I'm still half stunned I come to the uncomfortable ralization that I'm being dragged backwards into the hole.

I wrench myself up as much as possible and to try to beat off whatever snake got me, I see that it's a tree branch. A tree grabbed me. A tree is dragging me into the hole I found.

I claw at the soil and rocks and then at the branch around my leg, but it doesn't do any good. I'm summarily stuffed into the hole in the ground and a layer of leaves were dragged over top of where I had, just thirty seconds before, been standing above ground and safe.

Once I'm landed in rank mud I lay there for a minute, panting and trying to get the air back into my lungs (and resist throwing up) I hear something else breathing next to me, too.

I hold my breath, then gulp in two deep ones when I start seeing stars. “Hello?” Because if it's a vampire, I at least want to know about it.

The lump I've landed next to clears its throat and then coughs. It's a very human sound, not a dog or a vampire. Not that I know what a vampire would sound like.

“Hello indeed,” the lump's voice replies. It's masculine and rough with probably literal grit, and has a fairly strong RP accent that you don’t hear as often these days. At least not where I’m from.

The light is poor under all the leaves, and the mud obscures most of what can be seen, but as my eyes adjust, I get a clearer and clearer idea of the thing I'm trapped with. Mainly that it's not a thing, and is in fact a middle aged man under a thick layer of mud and grime and tree sap. He's bunched up into an uncomfortable looking position, and it takes me awhile to see that it's enforced by the root system that seems to be gnarled up everywhere in the hole. It has him pinned into place like something straight out of a horror film. He's in what was probably at one point a nice suit, but that's now caked in mud and torn at the seams. But even with all that, and in the bad light, it seems very possible that he matches the man in the picture on my now-dead mobile.

He looks like he’d been asleep. And from the beard starting to grow in, like he’s been trapped here at least a day.

I probably should ask a question like: “Do you know how to get out of here?” Or, “How does the monster tree thing work?” But instead I ask, “Are you Thomas Nightingale? Owner of the Georgian terrace in Russell Gardens?”

He looks up at me like I'm some sort of alien with three heads. Which is understandable, really. I probably should have lead with something else, but as my most recent ex-girlfriend will attest, I’m not really great at communication. Picking at mysteries is more my style.

“I am.”

“Um. I’m Peter Grant? I’m here to rescue you?”

He stares at me for a long moment, and I feel very much like an ant under a microscope. If that ant under a microscope were also under a _giant monster man eating tree._

“Are you with the police? I haven’t seen you before.”

“Ah. No.”

“Did the rivers send you? Nevermind, that is unlikely of late.”

“The rivers? No. I, um, your cleaning person? The one from Russell Square? She told me you were last around here. I’m an architect, I--”

The stare returns. “Molly _told_ you this.” There is really starting to be a pattern with people cutting me off before I'm able to explain myself.

I clear my throat. “Well, she sent me twitter DMs. Direct messages, that is. I get the sense that she isn’t much of one for more... vocal conversation.”

“Twitter. I see.”

He has the blank stare of my aunts when I mention Instagram. I decide enough is enough and it is high time to get out of this cold, wet hole. I try to stand up, to break through the arrangement of leaves and roots above our heads, when the branch still around my ankle tightens, and Nightingale shouts out.

“Don’t!”

The instant my hands shove up to the web of branches above our heads, the tree monster clamps onto my ankle harder, and deposits me once again into the mud next to Nightingale. With a great deal of force. I'm left panting in the mud, scrambling to get my shaking hands under me to sit up straight.

“Okay! Enough! What the hell is going on!”

Nightingale sighs a big, true sigh. I'm suddenly reminded that for all my frustration and fear of being trapped here, he's been here for god knows how much longer. I never did figure out how long he'd been missing, but it can't have been just since tea. He touches a hand to one of the roots keeping him in place. “It’s an entrapment spell. A very, very powerful one that’s been here for hundreds of years, likely, stemming from that oak tree."

"The people eating monster tree."

He digests that. "In a very ... colloquial way, yes. Anyhow, I haven’t quite figured it out how to break it yet. It's keeping me here for some reason, and I don't know why. It killed the others.”

I go cold. I'd never felt that before, but what people say is true. Your blood stops, your heart leaps, and your whole body flushes with ice. I work to get enough saliva back into my dry mouth to say, "Others?"

He waggles a hand dismissivly. "Yes. A recent disappearance sparked my concern, but the bodies I found died at least five years ago. Teenagers, I'm afraid; tragic."

“Yes.”

I try not to think about it. About dying in here and being found by some other detective in ten years. My mum will never know what happened to me, and Lansing & Powell will build that horrible concrete brick right on top of Russel Square.

Then the rest of what he’s said comes zig zagging back through my mind. Try as I might, I can't think about murdered teenagers from the early 2000s or my own all to vivid mortality.

“Back up a minute. Entrapment spell? You mean spell-spell? Not code for something?”

He squints at me.

“Yes. I thought your people eating monster tree would have been a hint. Magic is at play-- real magic, not tricks. I thought it was a vampire nest, with the way that locals behaved about it, but I no longer believe that. It has the air of a genius locci, but there’s no one here. Only the tree. The cottage is merely its lure.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

He waves the one hand of his that is free in a dismissive motion. “Never you mind.”

But I do mind. And my mind minds. I’ve always been good at holding onto random pieces of information. Trivia nights, studying for exams, I usually managed to hold my own pretty well. And there was something niggling the back of my mind about this whole situation, something I hadn’t thought of in years and years.

“We’re in Wayland Wood.”

Nightingale eyes me carefully. It’s hard to see him in the darkness, but there’s a calculating look about him. “We are.”

“There’s that story about Wayland Wood. Two babies murdered, I think? Left to die under a tree? One of those really old stories, yeah?”

It’s an ancient story, never adapted, and so it doesn’t have the glaze of Disney to top it off with sugar and nice. Two children, a boy and a girl, whose parents died, were left in the care of their uncle somewhere near Wayland Wood. They were set to inherit once they grew up, and the uncle was a greedy bastard, so he took them into the woods and left them there to die, for the money. They're babies and can't fend for themselves, and so they do die, and the story goes that their ghosts haunt the woods. It’s not a very nice story.

Nightingale goes even stiller than he had been before. “I have not heard that story in a very long time. It drastically changes my approach.”

“You have an approach?” It's news to me. I’d practically stood on top of the man and hadn’t had an idea he was there. My mobile was dead and I had no way of contacting @MollyCooks1912 or my mum or the police. In my book, things look pretty bad.

“There’s a newer part to the story-- the tree under which the babes were left to die was struck by lightning.”

That part is news to me.

He continues, “It’s possible that the report was not entirely accurate. Lighting... I wonder...”

He shifts a little. It’s hard to see what he’s doing-- the light is bad, filtered through the branches and leaves above us-- but he pulls out a little rod. Or at least that’s what it looks like. He closes both fists over it, and starts muttering under his breath.

At this point a very possible hypothesis would have been that D.C.I. Nightingale of the Metropolitan Police had cracked. He'd fallen down a hole and was jabbering about magic trees and fairy tales and was dangerously dehydrated, causing hallucinations. Except the tree grabbed me. I saw it grab me-- it wasn't an animal or a rope, it was a massive people eating oak tree, and until now I'd never questioned my grip on reality. So if unless I question that grip on reality more strongly, I have to accept that the massive people eating oak tree is real. And if that's real, then maybe D.C.I. Nightingale hasn't cracked. And if he hasn't cracked, maybe-- just maybe-- what he's doing is real, honest to god magic.

The rod in his hands starts to glow, and the tree branches above us flutter and peel back, revealing a dark sky. Lightning crackles in the distance, and I shiver.

“How are you doing that?”

Nightingale ignores me, and the root system that is acting as our jail starts to loosen, too. As soon as it releases my ankle I’m scrambling up the edge of the hole. I get to the top and then sprawl on my back, smelling the decomposing rot of the leaves and breathing the fresh air. It starts to rain again, and I feel it on my face like it’s magic.

I reluctantly flop myself over onto my belly and crawl to the edge of the hole to help Nightingale out. Only he’s still sat in the middle, eyes closed and concentrating, still muttering.

“Nightingale?”

A clap of thunder shakes the ground and a bolt of lightning streaks across the sky, so close I wonder for a half second if it hasn’t hit me. But it misses, and after I blink away the after image of it seared into my brain, I look down at Nightingale again. This time he’s stood up, looking a little unsteady.

“We should get out of here!” The rain is coming down harder now, and I have to shout a bit to get my voice heard. I’m starting to get nervous about the water coming down and filling the hole Nightingale is in. Architecture school isn't all just drawing gutsy high rises in the margins of notebooks. l spent many hours learning things about water management and erosion; it's not pretty if things aren't built right, and the sky is opening up like a hundred year rainstorm on top of a steeply graded mud hole.

“Not yet, Peter. Have patience.”

He starts to mutter again and I watch his lips, trying to make out what he’s saying. I can barely hear it over the rain, and not well enough to make out the specific words, but it sounds like Latin maybe. I remember the words carved into the lintel above his house on Russell Square. They were Latin, too. The rod in his hands suddenly flares bright and shatters. He stumbles back, and I flinch, too. The little shards of whatever it was made out of fly through the air like tiny projectiles, and one almost gets me in the arm. Somehow none hit Nightingale, though. He flings up a hand and mutters another Latin something or other, and they bounce off him like soft toys.

That’s a neat trick.

“Now we can go,” he says, and scrambles up the edge of the hole towards me. I grab his hand and pull him up the rest of the way, and he looks up at me in surprise when we touch.

A wave of something hits me, again. The faint smell of leather, honey, a three-day-ago smoked cigar, and old books. Well at least I had found the common factor in that little experience, weird as it was.

Once we're both up top and upright, the two of us soaked to the bone in rain and mud and looking like swamp people, I start to walk down the hill towards my car, but Nightingale doesn’t follow me. Instead he walks towards the cottage and the massive people eating oak tree growing out of it.

“What are you doing?”

I still have to shout to be heard; the rain is coming down like something biblical, and it makes the footing over the slick leaves dicey at best.

“The tree,” he says as he walks towards it.

“Yes. The evil tree,” I shout back. “That tried to kill us.”

“But it didn’t. It kept me alive. It’s been waiting for a wizard and it finally got one. It needs me to do something, and thanks to you, Peter, I know what.”

I repeat that sentence back to myself several times, trying to process it. Three times in I can’t make heads or tails of it. But Nightingale doesn’t wait for me to catch up to him, physically or mentally. He just walks around the side of the house, fighting his way through the pelting rain, places a head on the trunk of the massive oak tree, and then lifts his other hand up and a fiery orb appears in it. He flicks his hand, says a word, and it floats down to the side of his feet, burning through roots and brush and wet leaves all at once, leaving a meter wide hole punched through the ground like it was nothing.

“Why didn’t you do that when you were trapped? To escape?”

“Hush, Peter.”

He closes his fist and the fire dies out, and the hole he’s made is left sizzling as the rain hits the red-hot edges. He drops into it feet first, and my curiosity gets the better of me. Despite every instinct I have telling me to get the hell out away from this place and back to my car (the car I still don’t have keys for) I inch towards Nightingale and the tree.

His head is still visible-- the hole isn’t that deep.

“There they are,” he says. As soon as he says it, the rain calms, just coming down in drips instead of the torrential flood it was before.

I come to stand at the edge of the perfectly round pit and look down. At his feet are two tiny skeletons. Infants, curled up together like they're asleep. I have the horrible urge to pick them up and comfort them. I have too many cousins of varying ages not to imagine two of them down here instead.

“Poor things,” Nightingale says. He reaches down and brushes the dirt off of one of the skulls and it shines white and clean in the rain. “I should have realized so much sooner.”

“This is... them? The babes in the wood?”

He nods and is silent. I think for a second that he’s praying, but then he stands up suddenly. He’s covered in mud and grime and has a stubble beard that doesn’t suit him, but he still looks an impressive figure. “And it’s time to put an end to the story.”

We rebury the tiny little skeletons. Properly, this time.

By the time we’re moving the bones, and we pile rocks atop them as markers, the sky is clear and blue. My mobile is still dead and I don't carry a watch, but somehow it's still just evening, even though it's felt like days have passed.

I look back for the cottage, but it's gone. The tree is still there, though, and I shiver.

“Now, Peter,” Nightingale asks as we dust off the best we can. “I think it’s time you told me how exactly you met Molly and came to be here.”

I swallow. Suddenly it’s very easy to see Nightingale as a copper and me as some unsavory type he’s questioning. “Any chance we could head back to London first?”

I start to explain about my Astro and my lost keys, but Nightingale waves me off. “I’ll send someone up to collect your car tomorrow. For now we’ll take the Jag.”

Nightingale has an honest to god Jaguare. It’s a classic one, although I can't spot the year, and it’s in pristine condition, too. The chrome is shiny, the paint has been waxed. I almost feel bad touching it as I get into the passenger seat, but Nightingale is just as filthy, so I let go my guilt. It feels divine to sit down in a clean, safe place that isn't a hole under a haunted tree.

The Jag rumbles to life, and I feel the engine through the seat. There’s no bells and whistles in the car, nothing modern at all. It makes Nightingale, sitting at the wheel and piloting us away from Wayland Wood and back towards London, look like something out of time, too.

I tell him about my job at Lansing & Powell, about doing research for the building that’s going to take the place of the row homes on Russell Square, about our clinet, Lady Ty, and about my own findings, that the acquisition of the property was hinkey as heck and nothing gets fast-tracked the way her project did.

He, “hms,” at various points in the story, but lets me tell it.

“I see,” he says, once I reach the end. “Well, we’ll have to put that to rights. Lady Ty’s move is quite brazen, but I’m not terribly surprised by it. However someone produced a false lead about a vampire nest to lure me here, and that will have to be dealt with.”

And that’s about as far as I can go in the conversation without the part of me that wants to know everything about what’s happening pipes up.

“Okay, really though. What happened back there?”

Nightingale looks over at me. There's something inscrutable about his face. “Tell me what you think happened.”

I look out at the English countryside that’s whipping past the windscreen and decide how batshit I want to appear to a police officer who I'm trapped in a moving vehicle with. I settle on fully bonkers.

“I think a possessed tree imprisoned you to force you to deal with the remains of those kids. I think it’s been doing that to other people, too, and that they’re all probably dead. And that you... used magic... to do what the tree wanted.”

It sounds absolutely mad when I say it out loud.

Nightingale smiles. It’s not a big smile, but it’s still there, under the mud.

“Not bad, Peter. Not bad at all.”

\---

Nightingale drops me off at my crappy apartment near work, and promises that a constable will bring my car back tomorrow, if I can get him a spare set of keys for it. I take a shower, climb into bed, and then stare at the ceiling until eventually morning comes. I’m not sure if I ever actually fell asleep or not.

I get up and walk to work, as if it were a normal day. My mobile sputters to reluctant life after I pick up a new battery for it, and I say hello to Lor as I make my way to my desk. She waves a hand at me without looking up from her computer. But then when she sees it’s me, she whips her head up.

“Damien is looking for you,” she says.

Bollocks.

I set my phone to charge at my cubicle, vowing to steal at least a few drops of electricity before I get fired.

Damien Mally is perched on the edge of his massive desk in his dramatically over-designed office. Somehow he looks a lot less intimidating now that I’ve faced off with a possessed tree, but I still take a breath before I walk all the way into the room. This is my first 'real' job since graduating, and sure it's not perfect, but I still don't want to walk out the door with a plant in a box.

“Grant," Damien says. I can't tell if it's good or bad that he doesn't call me Peter, because he never calls me Peter. "I got a call this morning.”

“Oh?”

He stares at me. “Yes. A very surprising call. The permits for Lady Ty’s project have been pulled by the city. And Lady Ty has subsequently pulled the project pending an investigation. We lost the job.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. We lost our biggest client, Grant. And she pointed her finger at you. Do you have anything to say about that?”

“Um. I’m fired?” Me and my big mouth.

“What? No. You saved us from a massive scandal. Lady Ty should have disclosed the nature of her property acquisition, and she didn’t. If the project had gone forward, we could have lost much more.”

“Oh.”

He does a half jump to launch himself off the desk and onto the floor and claps me on the back. “Well done, Grant. Now, get back to work.”

I sit down at my desk in a bit of shock. Lor looks at me quizzically and I shrug at her. My phone chirps at me, and I look down.

@MollyCooks1912: :) :) :)

@LordGrant2: Got your boss back?

@MollyCooks1912: Supper is at 6. Don’t be late. Thomas has something he wants to ask you.

I sit there, holding the phone for a minute. My fingers are hovering over the keyboard, debating what to reply.

@LordGrant2: I’ll be there.

\---

Walking up the stairs to the Russell Square row house feels different this time. All the other windows have the yellow sign removed from them, and there’s the smell of something... bean based... wafting through the street. I’m a little worried it’s our dinner.

Molly opens the door for me before I even make it to the top step. She’s just as creepy looking as I remember, and she’s hiding a smile behind her hand when I get to the entryway. It's oddly endearing, even if she still looks like something out of a black and white film.

“Peter.”

Thomas Nightingale has cleaned up, and it takes me a second to even recognize him as the same man I shared an almost-grave with. He’s wearing a gray suit with a waistcoat, complete with pocket watch chain looped into a buttonhole. He’s standing beside the statue I remembered from when I first visited here. With Molly sliding in behind him like a shadow, the whole effect makes me feel like I’m in Downton Abbey or something. My mum watches it.

“Hello,” I say. I sound daft. The horrible bean smell is definitely coming from here.

“Molly says you’re staying for dinner.” He winces. “Very good."

There's an awkward silence, then. Nightingale is clearly working his way up to saying something, and I manage not to put my foot in my mouth in the meantime.

Finally, he says, "Peter, your help yesterday was quite valuable. And you kept a cool head despite very unusual circumstances."

"Oh. It was no problem?"

He clears his throat. "And you asked good questions, and displayed interest in the craft. I wonder..."

Molly now has both hands over her mouth behind him, her eyes twinkling.

"Have you any interest in learning magic?"

_fin._


End file.
